The Whiskey Rebellion Series

On Christmas morning, 1794, twenty thousand Philadelphians mobbed the broad, cobbled streets of their city to see the defeated whiskey rebels brought in from the west. If the people were expecting a big show, they had reason to be disappointed. There were twenty prisoners, and General Blackbeard White himself had been given the job of escorting them from the Forks. Already skinny, pale, and exhausted by questioning and imprisonment when leaving Fort Fayette on November 25, they’d spent a month crossing mountains forbidding enough in summer, locked now in winter. Each prisoner had walked. General White ordered the beheading of anyone attempting escape: heads, he’s announced hopefully, would be displayed in the city. Only twelve cases went to trial, and in the end only two rebels were convicted. With the crisis over, Washington pardoned the condemned men.

In Washington’s stated opinion, suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion had drawn from the American people the support for law and government that marked their highest character. Washington also noted that the operation worked out well for him personally. With commercial distilling newly profitable, he added whiskey making to his endeavors at Mount Vernon.

Yet the whiskey tax remained hard to collect. There were occasional disruptions of court proceedings and occasional threats, but mainly there was sneakiness and recalcitrance, smuggling and moonshining. The authority that established itself at last in the western country was not challenged. It was eluded.

In the election of 1800, the Jeffersonians came to power and the whiskey tax was repealed.

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

The whole population had been defined as insurgent. The very presence of federal troops made the Forks a kind of battlefield. Rules for capturing and interrogating prisoners of war weren’t governed by the Bill of Rights. By the time the army began making mass arrests at the Forks, it seemed to Forks moderates that more than two thousand men had fled the area; almost anybody who had committed an act of terror, and wasn’t within amnesty, had gone down the Ohio or into the countryside.

Hundreds of Forks residents, within and without amnesty, were yanked from bed at bayonet point in the cold. Foot soldiers prodded the startled prisoners, close to naked and some barefoot, out of cabins  into new-fallen snow while mounted officers barked commands and told furious wives and crying children that the men were being taken to be hanged. All were run through the snow in chains, toward various lockups in town jails, stables, and cattle pens, to await interrogation.

General Anthony “Blackbeard” White, of the New Jersey militia, was well known for mental instability. For more than two days, White starved and dehydrated his shivering, exhausted captives, steadily cursing and castigating them, glorying in their helplessness and describing their imminent hanging. He quick-marched them twelve miles through bad weather to the town of Washington, where in physical and emotional collapse, they were held in jail, without charge, ready for questioning by the military.

In the days after the Dreadful Night, mass arrests went on anyway: the brutality of the arrests and the torment of detention served the purpose of discouraging citizens of the Forks – and everywhere else – not only from engaging in resistance but also from forming societies and organizations.

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

The citizen army that Washington and Hamilton were moving west had two classes. Officers came from the ranks of the creditor aristocracy in the seaboard cities. The men these cavaliers were commanding were mainly militia draftees. Because better-off draftees hired substitutes to serve in their places, the ranks were crowded with the poorest laborers and landless workers, recent immigrants and subsistence farmers.

The draftees had no uniforms. Their clothing couldn’t keep out autumn dampness and chill. To Hamilton’s frustration, the supply process was chronically sluggish, and desperately needed tents, overalls, and jackets, even blankets, were scarce. The men slept in cold fields, sometimes in tents but always on the ground, usually without straw for insulation. Drinking water could be bad, food paltry. Officers stayed in warm taverns and homes, where they spent their plentiful coin on extra food and drink. At times they were lavishly fed and entertained by hosts who could proffer fine wines and the charms of piano-playing daughters. Out in the camps, men drank whiskey and fired newly issued muskets for fun. Drunk on wine in brick houses, officers didn’t focus on orders not to waste powder.

Mornings began with floggings. Draft evasion had been rampant, with militiamen simply running and hiding. Once pressed into service, men deserted incorrigibly, embarrassing state governors and undermining the mission’s political spin: this was supposed to be a patriotic citizen army, reporting eagerly for duty to suppress ambitious traitors.

Foot soldiers felt resentment for the mission and had hopes mainly for plunder. They were all hungry and cold. While families cowered in farmhouses, freelancing soldiers crashed drunk through fields of just-ripened crops, tearing down fences for firewood, slaughtering chickens and pigs, buildings fires, and sleeping where they fell.

This army seemed thirstier for blood, more intent on murder, less disciplined. Rebel militias had been trying to take over the legitimate government. These soldiers were even more frightening: they were the legitimate government.